Hold your breath: a song of climate change

By Bob Hicok

Aug. 23, 2018

Hold your breath and sing at the same time? Impossible. Yet the excuses for inaction in Bob Hicok’s parable of environmental greed rapidly rise to a rousing chorus of denial. W.H. Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety” has devolved into an age of outrage whose citizenry has grown adept at justifying procrastination to the point of changing course to suit its comfort. Hicok’s exhortation to accept responsibility for our future falls on conveniently stoppered ears: The final line, with its rhyming monosyllables, lands like a judge’s gavel. Selected by Rita Dove

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Rita Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate of the United States. She edited “The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry,” and her “Collected Poems: 1974-2004” was published in 2016. Bob Hicok is the author of nine collections of poetry, including “Hold,” out in October from Copper Canyon Press.

Illustration by R.O. Blechman

A version of this article appears in print on , Page 17 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Hold Your Breath: A Song Of Climate Change. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe